Sprocketforge Review

My board game word of the year for 2025 is adaptability. Of all the games I've tinkered around in this year, the titles that I loved the most proved capable of contorting themselves to multiple skill levels and player counts without having to rely on modularity as a crutch.

Sprocketforge's regular mode threads the needle of being a heads-down Euro with meaningful player interaction deftly enough that you can drop it in front of almost any group and nobody's going to make anyone else miserable, but anyone trying their best to optimize their own game is forced to constantly factor in their opponents' board states.

Gameplay is straightforward: players have 5 gears that they'll be enchanting and sealing in your typical Euro race to an end-game points trigger. Turns consist of choosing an action that everyone else will get the opportunity to follow with a weaker version, completing contracts, and storing or exhausting any excess mana before ultimately rotating your gears one segment. In the early game, you'll mostly be hitting up the Production action to activate the top wedge of your gears, hopefully generating the mana you need to fulfill contracts, and letting everyone else grab a mana of their choice or do the generic gear advancement. Otherwise, you'll be using Plan to grab new contracts and clean out the exhaust mana  filling up the top of your board whenever you complete contracts, with followers getting a choice of the two.

Once you've got enough of the 1-3 point favor cards, you'll want to extract some extra efficiency with Petitions, turning those favors into even more points and variable extra actions tiered by how clogged your exhaust is. Since anyone following has to have their exhaust amount to match your tier and throw in a favor, it's the most interactive action that really rewards proper timing so the rest of the table gets left out, but your own costs naturally make it a mid-late game choice, so you've had plenty of time to familiarize yourself with what you're doing in the head-down efficiency Euro. I'm here for it when a game's mechanics naturally progress you through its different levels, and the Petition action is a prime example.

So that's the basic game, which would've earned a place on my shelves by itself. Add in the advanced mode that ratchets up the complexity with only a handful of new rules, and I'm flabbergasted that this isn't getting more hype. The simplest change to the Production follow becoming activating one gear instead of just doling out a wild mana throws player interaction into high gear right out the gates and dramatically changes how you orient your enchantments. There's also Reforging, which simultaneously nerfs Disenchantment and buffs contracts that give seals as a reward.

In the base game, you can ditch an enchantment once a turn to get its production reward and any mana you had stored in it. It was a fine incentive to keep grabbing enchantment contracts, but having a couple gears dedicated to nabbing contracts usually could keep you on pace to make up for your losses. In the advanced game, you can forgo a seal reward to flip an enchantment over to its stronger side and toss any stored mana into your active pool, giving you a way other than disenchantment to get to your stored mana while also making you more invested in the enchantments you'd have to junk.

So far so good, but wait,  there's more! The advanced game also introduces asymmetric factions that are the icing on the cake. Enchantments have an icon specifically for this mode that triggers a faction's active, but it's the full build of each one that makes this mode really sing with stuff like one's contact queue, or another's bonuses for recycling their neighbors' exhaust. My only complaint is that the added mental load of both the mechanic changes and faction abilities does tend to add a lot of downtime for people to really plan their game and push the game out of hourish time window if you're playing with higher player counts. As such, I'm ironically left wishing the advanced mode had been implemented as modules so I could tailor the game to a group's size and skill level, but I understand that could've been a design nightmare that ranged from more trouble than it's worth to impossible to implement.